Remembering Erving Goffman (partial)

"Sometime in 1947, around midnight, in a small ' joint' at the corner of 63rd Street and Woodlawn in Chicago. Erving Goffman is talking breathlessly with his friend Saul Mendlovitz. When he arrived in Chicago , in 1945, there were floods of 'G.I. Bill' students around – but still few professors. In Sociology, there were about 200 graduate students for about ten professors. So the be best courses are the conversations that students have among themselves about their reading, their experiences and ideas. Goffman and Mendlovitz belong to a loose circle of students whose will become well known later (including Howard Becker, Jerry Carlin, Fred Davis, Eliot Freidson, Joseph Gusfield, Robert Habenstein, Richard Jeffrey, William and Ruth Kornhauser, Kurt and Gladys Lang, Hans Mauksch, Bernard Meltzer, Greg Stone, William Westley).
"Saul and Erving very often eat together t night and 'talk like rabbis' as Saul will say to me later. On Freud, whose work Goffman handles quite well; on Proust, whom Goffman admires a lot, on Gustav Ichheiser, an Austrian phenomenologist, exiled in Chicago, lonely and angry whose papers Mendlovitz passed on to Goffman; on Kenneth Burke, who offers a seminar that year at the University of Chicago and who keeps cracking jokes that Goffman likes very much.
"Chicago is bursting with ideas and brilliant visitors, not so much in Sociology, a department which is getting old and keeps feuding all the time, but all around, like Social Sciences II, a big undergraduate course offered in the college by people like Daniel Bell, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Bruno Bettelheim and others. Goffman is somewhere in the there, swallowing it all up."
Source: Remembering Erving Goffman (www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/archives/interactionism/goffman/winkin99.html)